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demure · 3237 days ago · link · · parent · post: The Dark Night: The geopolitics of a perpetual North Korea
Huh. Rationally speaking, North Korea couldn’t possibly launch a nuclear strike. Therefore, it was critical for North Korea to appear irrational. Only apparent irrationality, meticulously managed, could convince the Americans, South Koreans, Japanese, Russians, and Chinese that North Korea was utterly dangerous. But the regime’s apparent irrationality had to be calibrated in such a way that North Korea’s dangerousness was never so credible or imminent that someone would preemptively attack it. It had to preserve the regime and paralyze its opponents without forcing military action by its adversaries.